Silas Lyons: Finding love in the passing blur

This question, posed in a brief and brilliant made-for-iPhone essay by writer Robin Sloan, has been needling me for months.

Sloan makes a personal observation that hit me with the force of self-evidence. “I have become very troubled,” he writes, “by the way I am reading and watching things.”

Me too. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, actually. And because we publish the most widely read digital local news source in the upper third of California, my personal interest in the topic takes on practical urgency.

Sloan goes on to explain that the source of his distress isn’t exactly what you’d think. He’s actually finding great stuff to read and watch — too much of it. This isn’t Springsteen’s “57 Channels” with nothing on.

The problem is there’s too much. Way too much.

We have no time to let our attention rest on a subject. We move on. And then we recommend to a friend the thing from which we just moved on. Perhaps we email it, or click “share” or “like” on Facebook. We tweet it, we text it.

But we don’t stop.

I won’t give away Sloan’s whole essay, which is presented in an app called “Fish,” because you really should track it down and read it for yourself.

This pace is exhausting.

For all the promise of the Internet — and for all its genuine greatness — it is too big. Browsing the Internet is like shopping in all the world’s stores at once, all linked by little portals. Would you ever remember what you came for?

The fact that our portable devices now follow us everywhere, bringing all that along right there behind their pleasantly soft touch screens, quickens the pace and removes the moments in between.

Lately, I almost feel a need to overcompensate.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my iPhone. But I’ve found myself drawn to fewer things, and drinking more deeply from each.

Right now, I am reading Joseph Campbell’s extraordinary book on mythology, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” for the second time. I’ve decided that Scientific American really is worth $35 a year for an iPad subscription, because I want my time with that subject to be focused and I want someone else to collect its most topical items for me. I want to go back to an issue and find it still there. Waiting for me.

I haven’t listened to the radio in my car for two months because I’ve been replaying the same audiobook over and over, extracting new meaning each time.

I used to encourage my 6-year-old to keep moving on to new books each night at bedtime, but lately I’ve realized he’s doing the same thing I am. He reads the familiar because he isn’t finished with it. He likes the story ... Scratch that. He loves the story. And wants it again.

I remember my own childhood, when I could recite the entire first volume of Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories before I had learned to read. I loved Uncle Arthur’s stories.

I don’t think we’re meant to change topics as often as we do.

Scientists don’t either.

“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, told The New York Times. “We know already there are consequences.”

We range too far, too frequently, to feel the moment. Too much flitting and not enough sitting.

All this leads me back to my thoughts about the work we do through Redding.com and our smartphone and tablet apps.

One key to our future as the leading local news source is, paradoxically, this wild fragmentation of our digital lives.

We’re betting our future on the idea that you’ll get tired of it.

As my colleague Dave Johnson puts it, we want to be the Costco of local news in our area. Not every store in the world — just a very intentional selection of a whole bunch of things you may need or want.

Unlike a book, our specific content changes frequently. But like anything that acquires familiarity — that is worth returning to — it should have a consistent voice and continually reveal something new.